


First Light

by elo_elo



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Angst, Daryl Dixon Smut, Developing Friendships, Developing Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Past Child Abuse, Past Domestic Violence, Protective Daryl Dixon, Recreational Drug Use, Slow Burn, Smut, a whole lot of it, and a lot of the same events, but the same feel, fucked with canon a little, sweet smut, to accommodate the OC
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:22:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25041595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elo_elo/pseuds/elo_elo
Summary: Sadie Woodcock comes back to Georgia to watch her grandmother die. To sit in the trailer where she grew up and hold her mother’s hand until it’s over. It doesn’t go quite like that.~updates on hold probably until next year~
Relationships: Daryl Dixon/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 42





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve been watching The Walking Dead to try and shake off some quarantine blues and hoo boy, love that Daryl Dixon. I hope you enjoy the story that’s been percolating in my brain :)

She comes around from the back of the gas station. Sadie spots her as she’s digging through her bag in the backseat. Stops. Straightens. She feels a shift inside of her, just a sudden change in the air, heavy now without a breeze. She zips her bag up, shrugs it off, but keeps watching. Can’t seem to help it.

The woman’s in an old house dress, the kind her grandmother might wear to bed. It looks a little frayed at the ends, bunched up on one side. Her hair’s askew, hanging limp around her shoulders, so thick with grease it shimmers.. Sadie glances around the station. A ramshackle little building that leans more one way than the other; a couple rusted pumps. She doesn’t see another car; hasn’t seen a car on this road since they turned off the main highway heading south from Atlanta. And there sure as hell isn’t a town walking distance from here. It’s like she sprouted up from the ground.

The woman stops just at the edge of the dirt lot and her whole body seems to shiver, just a single, rolling movement. Sadie presses the car’s back door gingerly closed. It’s hanging practically by a thread, makes an awful rattling noise if you slam it too hard. Her brother’s had this car since he was in high school. Still does all his own maintenance as far as she can tell. Doesn’t appear to have gotten much better at it.

Sadie leans against the side of the car and watches the woman start across the road. The station’s dirt lot presses up against a road so beat up it might as well be gravel. Across from that, a dense thicket of trees. Every so often, she’ll catch just a hint of some rotten, rancid smell, so she’d bet that the trees slope down toward a stagnant creek, a split cover of algae, stiff, dirty foam bubbling from the banks. The woman seems to be heading down toward it, her feet slipping under her as she walks, hitting every bump in the road as she goes. She’s too far away for Sadie to make out the finer features of her face.

Sadie wipes a line of sweat from her forehead. She’s overdressed. Jeans, a light sweater. There’d been a dusting of snow on the ground when she left Amherst. A late spring squall. But here, _here_ it feels like it could be pushing eighty. Air nearly boiling, thick and damp, even now that the day’s dragging towards evening.

She pushes her sleeves up her arms. Her fingers shake just a little as she does. Residual. She’d had a panic attack on the plane. Like the ones she used to get as a kid. Heart pounding, palms clammy. She’d folded herself over, trying not to cry, trying to fight the urge to climb out of her seat.

It was like her body could feel the plane turn south and started to fight. The dregs of it are still hanging off her, muscles in her chest jumpy like an echo of her heart. She swats at a mosquito. “They got a lotta bugs out where you are now?”

Sadie glances over her shoulder as Jesse comes into view, one hand up to shield his eyes from the sun. “Not quite like this, no.”

He hands her a bottle of water, cracks open one of those long cans of monster and takes a long drink of it. “Huh.” Their eyes meet. Level. Same height, same weight. Always have been. Much to his chagrin. She got called willowy; he scrawny. 12 months apart and yet standing here, just a foot between them, Sadie feels an almost impossible gulf widening there. He looks older now. Much. Even since the last time she saw him two years ago. Skin a little leathered by the sun. He’s trying for a beard but the blonde on his chin and cheeks looks a little patchy. “Well,” he says, adjusting his ballcap and heading over to the driver’s side, “gas was free today.”

“What?”

Jesse shrugs, “nobody behind the counter.”

Sadie frowns. “Really?” But she’s already looking back at the woman. Drawn to her. She hasn’t even made it halfway across the road yet, still shambling along.

“Yep.” He shrugs again, “left some money by the register. Figured it would be good enough.”

“That’s…” the woman stumbles and, for a moment, it looks like one whole side of her body is shifting downward before she rights herself, shaking her head. That feeling, the shift she’d felt inside of her, returns. Sadie swallows. “Huh.”

“What are you out here looking at anyway?”

She nods toward the woman, then glances back toward him. “Weird, right?”

Jesse makes a face. “What’s weird?”

When Sadie looks back at her, she’s almost in the same spot, one foot dragging forward and back. “She’s not even looking at the road. Just looks dazed.”

“Yeah, and?”

She frowns back at him. “She’s fucking barefoot out here in the middle of nowhere. You don’t think that’s weird?”

“Not really. She’s probably tweakin’. You forget where we are?”

Sadie glances around again. At the empty highway, at the endless trees. “I guess. Just spooky is all. Don’t you think?”

“Since when do you get spooked? They making you soft up there?”

“I’m not, I just…” She turns away from the woman, back toward the car. “I’m not.”

Jesse nods, opening the driver’s door, then pauses. Sadie pauses too, feels the air warp a little around them, get heavier. He pats the top of the car. “Been a while.”

Sadie swallows hard. “Been a while what?’

“Since I seen you. Since you been here.”

Sadie curls her fingers around the top of her open door. Opens her mouth, closes it, opens it again. “I know.”

“How bad is she?” Sadie asks when they pull back onto the road. Jostling in her seat as his bald tires roll over the cracked asphalt. She watches the woman from the rearview mirror, watches as she stumbles down toward the trees. Her limbs look heavy, like her joints are loose. She doesn’t look as she starts to head down to where Sadie imagined the creek, like she isn’t afraid to trip. Sadie squints then looks away.

“They was talking hospice last time I was up at the hospital.” 

“Jesus Christ.”

Jesse

looks over at her. “She said she knew you’d be coming. Had a dream about it.”

Sadie pulls her hair up, ties it off with the elastic that’s been wearing a groove along her wrist. Jesse’s got air but the car still feels sticky. “Yeah well, I’m not sure that’s really all that clairvoyant. Ma asked me to come back.”

“She’s been having a lot of dreams about you lately apparently.” Sadie fixes him with a look that he just shrugs off. “Was telling me about them last time I came for a visit and she was awake.” Lots of time to dream, she figures, with the cocktail they’ve got to be pumping her with now.

Sadie clears her throat, pulling one knee up to rest her head on. “Well people dream, so.”

Jesse scoffs. “Oh so is that where we are with that huh?” Sadie just shrugs, looking out the window. She wishes she had a cigarette or a coffee. Just something to do with her hands. “I’m just saying. When that old woman says it’s gonna rain, it rains.”

She taps her knuckles on the glass, so humid that condensation rolls down it like rain. “Yeah, a regular weatherman.”

Jesse reaches over to turn on the radio. It comes out garbled, sort of strange. He turns the dial but it’s more of the same, so finally he sighs and shuts it off. She’s not surprised when he speaks again. Jesse never could stand quiet. “You missing much class for this?”

Sadie shakes her head. “No, semester ended last week. Just missing a few hours in the lab,” He doesn’t say anything, rolls the window down a little more until the sound of the air rushing past fills the car. Sadie shifts to slide her phone from the back pocket of her jeans. No new messages and no emails. She frowns, slides the screen up to see that she has no bars “Do you have service?”

“Out here? Nah.”

She settles back a little in the seat, frowns at her phone. They’re heading down roads she’s starting to recognize, just an hour out now from their hometown and that feeling she’d gotten on the plane ignites a little inside of her. “I feel like we used to get service out here.”

“Shit’s changed, I guess.”

It rains up North, but not like this. Nothing quite as oppressive as a Southern rain. Threatening in the air all day then cracking open through the sky. Not drops, but sheets. Turning everything a swamp of blue and green. Hazy and blurred. Sometimes, back at school, back in Massachusetts, she’d dream of Southern rain. Wake gasping, damp, and her dark room would smell like Georgia summer air. Cloying, sticky. Nights like that she’d wander onto the porch, breathe in the crisp air and look out at the dark blots of maple and pine that lined the street. The quiet hum of the house where she’d rented a room, the soft glow of campus just a little down the hill. The night skies are different up North. A steady, reliable navy. Not the simmering pale blues she grew up with down here, a moving target of color. No Spanish moss, no crying cicadas. Quiet. All she can hear now is the rain. It’s deafening.

The windshield wipers race back and forth and Sadie sinks a little more into her seat, feet up, arms around herself. The travel has made her tired. Being here has made her tired, just the idea of it. She’s hazy like the trees that whizz by the windows and every so often, she’s sure she sees movement in her peripheries. Flashes of color or light from the treeline that seems, with each mile, to move closer and closer to the car. Figments of her imagination. Old spooks, older fears. Branches tapping on her window at night, the sound of shouting from beneath the door. Sadie kneads at her temples. It’s been a while since she’s had a good night’s sleep. Tossing and turning ever since her mother called her two weeks ago. _They don’t think it’ll be long now,_ she’d said over the phone, _it’d be the least you could do._

Whatever it was in her memory, it’s smaller here. Sadder. Duller. Night now. Rain gone. The darkness seems to creep in from between the trees, up off the road like waves of heat, summer mirages. Just a circle of trailers a little ways from the road. That shack of a leasing office in the center, all clapboard and peeling shingle. The playground beside it looks like it’s sinking into the earth, swings so low they skim the dirt. Sadie pulls her duffel out of the back seat and glances over at the neighboring trailer. It’s dark save for the shuddering light of a tv through the blinds. “Carol and Ed still live here?”

“Unfortunately.”

She glances back at Jesse. ‘Still that bad?”

“Hollering every night. She slept over a few weeks ago. Her and the kid. Looked like she’d been hit by a bus.”

Sadie looks back up at the trailer, her chest still tight. “Anyone call the cops yet?”

“What do you think?”

It’s the smell that gets to her. So familiar it makes her guts twist. Not a smell she could put words to really. Just home. Just memories. She doesn’t want to deal with any of them. Instead just sighs, lingering at the screen door. It’s the exact same as when she left it. The exact same as it’s been since she was a kid. Wood paneling, shaggy brown carpet. An old recliner to the left. An even older couch beside it, thick tv in the middle. Fake flowers on the old worn out table by the door, petals heavy with dust. The kitchen off to her right, refrigerator chugging loudly. She could walk this place blind, not that it would take her very long. A shoebox. In every sense of the word. One bedroom. Mom used to sleep on the pull-out couch, Jesse and Sadie whispering to each other from their bunks. She wonders what her and Jesse are doing now for sleeping arrangements. Wonder if Jesse ever tries to bring somebody home, if her mom’s still picking up men at the bar down the road. Not her problem, Sadie reminds herself, she’ll be gone again in a few days, a week tops. She drops her duffel by the couch and then, when her thoughts have slowed, the silence catches up with her. She frowns. “Is mom not here?”

“Must have gone out.”

“This late?”

He just shrugs.

The water’s tepid which is fine by her. She just wants something to scrub the heat of the day off, the dirt from all those back roads. She runs her palm down her body and tries to feel secure in it. _A home in yourself,_ her therapist used to say, _you’re the one who keeps you safe_. She’d told her mother just once that she was talking to someone and never again. What a phone call that had been. _Ain’t no reason to be airing out our private things._ Sadie scrapes her nails along her scalp. Her body feels like it’s in shock. Like a plant poorly repotted. Not acclimated. Wilting. The shower feels claustrophobic, narrowing. She’s six and she’s ten and she’s fifteen in this shower. Like a stacking doll, all the people she’s ever been and all the things she’s ever felt in this bathroom. It’s only when she leans over to shut the water off that she’s 25 again, that she can coax herself back into her body.

She wipes the steam from the mirror and immediately regrets it. It’s not the bathroom, or her face, it’s the two of them together. All wrong. She grimaces, leans down to rinse out her mouth.

Sadie feels a little cleaner out of the bathroom, a little more settled. A t-shirt, a pair of cloth shorts, hair wrapped up in a towel. Jesse’s spread out on the couch, the trailer still an eerie quiet, the tv down low. “Ma’s still not home?”

“Nope.” He cracks open a beer.

She stands at the mouth of the living room, curls her toes into the carpet. A brief sense of vertigo rushes over her. “Huh.” 

They doze off to reruns of America’s Funniest Home Videos and she starts awake to infomercials. The blinds are down, the room pitch dark. Sadie fumbles for her phone to try and orient herself. She can’t find it and the alarm clock on the bookcase hasn’t had batteries in it since her high school graduation. It could be midnight or it could be six am and when Sadie sits up from where she’d been curled on the couch her neck twinges. Jesse’s asleep in the recliner, hands folded over his chest. Looking younger than he had at the airport, looking more like the brother she left.

Sadie groans, blinking at the tv. And then she hears it. What must have woken her up. A scratching, just faint, coming from the front door. Sadie sits up more, rubs her eyes, and turns to look over the back of the couch. “Mom?” The scratching stops, just for a moment, only to start back up, faster than it was before, louder, more insistent. “Ma? Are you home?” She rises to her feet, brushing her hair from her face as she weaves down the hall toward the door, sleep still heavy on her. “Hello?” Silence again, then the scratching. Someone’s out there. She can see the shadow through the screen door, cast up against the wall. It feels heavy like a dream. The hall awash with blue darkness. There’s a security light out by the leasing office. It pools in the doorway and that’s when Sadie sees it. A woman. Crouched a little, her fingers dragging down the screen. Up and down, up and down and that feeling, the one that’s been stuck in her chest since the gas station, no, since way before that, spreads through her. Her voice is quieter now, her movements slow, and she thinks that maybe his is a dream after all. Because she recognizes the woman crouched on the trailer’s front steps. Sort of. A neighbor she’s sure. Some she’s seen just in passing. But there’s something wrong with her head. Sadie can see her scalp almost all of it and takes a reflexive step backward. “Jesse.” Then again, louder. “Jesse!’ She hears him stir, hears him mumble something. “I think you need to call an ambulance. I think someone’s hurt.”

The woman, as if charmed by her voice, rises up. The door is open. Sadie can’t remember how. Her jaw works over nothing, too loose, too empty. Her scalp is drooping down near her eye, like it’s sloughed off the bone. Sadie can’t move. Not a muscle. Her brain is ticking slowly back to life but it gives her nothing. She can’t piece together what she’s seeing, not any part of it. The woman reaches for her, hand moving slowly through the hot air, and that stench she’d caught whiffs of at the station fills the room.

The shot goes off like a bomb. Blood and glass and Sadie feels like all the air has been sucked from her lungs, burning hot. Her ears ring, so loud she can barely hear Jesse call her name. Over and over and over. Rhythmic and far away. The light falls across her body, the woman’s body. Tangled up in each other now. So bright it blinds her, hands too heavy to move.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	2. Chapter 2

“Zombies,” he says for the second time, this time with more conviction.

It’s morning now, soft light blading through the blinds, making shapes on the carpet. The shag is clumped with gore. They’re like two matchsticks, sat next to each other. He, facing the door; she, away from it. Sadie pulls her knees up, rests her head on her arms. She doesn’t look at him, looks instead at the wood paneled wall, at the single spatter of blood that curves along it, an almost perfect plume. Darkening now, blood black and tacky. But Sadie remembers a few hours before, scrubbing herself hard in the shower, that even the wet blood had looked too dark. Spoiled somehow, rotten. Sadie looks back down at the carpet. “I guess.”

She feels him turn to look at her, feels the sudden intensity of his gaze on the side of her face. “What else the bitch look like?”

Sadie swallows, then leans over, craning her head to look at the bottom of the trailer’s short steps where Jesse had rolled the woman. What she looks like, is a corpse. Any injuries Sadie might have seen or not seen in the haze of last night blown to hell by Jesse’s shotgun. She nods toward the gun. “When did you get that thing?”

His grip on the gun tightens. “It matter?”

Sadie shifts. “Well you just killed someone with it, so we might want to start taking stock.” She pauses, glancing over at him. He doesn’t look older anymore. Looks instead like a riled-up kid. Looks like he might be about to cry.

“I didn’t kill nobody.”

Sadie scoffs. “Are you kidding me?” His mouth tightens “That statistical likelihood of _zombies_ in our trailer park, or _in general_ , is pretty fucking slim, so if it’s alright with you I prefer we stick to the simplest explanation, okay?”

“Which is?” Sadie opens her mouth, closes it, remembers the matted gore in the woman’s hair, the sound that came rattling out of her throat when those blue lips parted. “That’s what I thought.”

Sadie bristles. “She was injured. Maybe tweaking out, I don’t know. We should have called an ambulance.” Her voice starts to rise, louder and louder with each word, an old rage roiling up inside of her. “You shouldn’t have just popped her in the fucking skull. Jesus Christ Jesse has the water out here turned your fucking brain? Have all the hicks you spend time with made you fucking insane? ‘Stand your ground’, right? God, I hate this fucking place. Why the hell do you have a shotgun anyway? What the hell you even need a shotgun for?”

“I hate when you start talking like this, goddamn.” He stands, gun at his side now, joints popping as he rolls his neck. “You think I actually killed somebody then you go ahead and call the fucking cops, okay? But we both know what the fuck we saw last night.” He scoffs. “And I know you don’t think so otherwise you wouldn’t have just let me roll the body down the front fucking steps where the whole park can see it. Go to hell.”

Sadie’s jaw tightens. She listens to him pad across the kitchen, listens to him rummage around in the fridge. The heat of the day is already settling in the air, even with the sun just barely skimming the horizon. “Mom should be back by now.”

“You don’t fucking say.”

Sadie sniffles. The light shifts through the screen door casting a new shadow that grows long and wide over the entryway, that shifts the blood into darkness.

Jesse crouches down over the body, head cocked, shotgun laid at his feet. The day is sweltering now, sun high in the sky. Not a single cloud in the almost scorched blue but the air so thick with moisture it feels, faintly, like a misting rain. Sadie bounces on her heels, arms crossed tightly around herself. She looks everywhere but at the corpse. The light of the day has rendered it in spectacular detail and what had seemed like a fever dream in the dark is now very, terrifyingly real. Sadie glances around the park. It’s empty. Emptier than she’s maybe ever seen it. Which is good, she reminds herself, suddenly very aware that she is, for all intents and purposes, aiding and abetting. It’s hitting her in waves, these feelings, a sort of familiar numbness settling inside of her, that white hot panic only bubbling up when she catches sight of the corpse, or that awful scent hits her. Which it does, when a soft breeze breaks through the thick morning air. Sadie scrunches up her nose, holding her arm in front of her face to shield herself from the stench. Like nothing she’s ever smelled in her life. “I think we should call the cops.” It’s the third time she’s said and, like all the others., Jesse just ignores her. She feels delirious. Her headache’s, worse than before, and her heart has started to flutter again like it had on the plane. She feels vaguely like she might just bend over and retch.

“I think it’s Denise.”

Sadie looks over at the tufts of grass at the bottom of the trailer’s steps, tries to ignore the way the corpse is looming in her peripheries. “Remind me.”

She can hear him sit back on his haunches, hear him spit off to the side. Another habit she doesn’t remember him having. “Two trailers down. Divorced. Real ugly. Cops came a bunch when we were kids.”

“Not really ringing a bell.”

“Wouldn’t expect you to remember.” She frowns, looking back behind her. The door to the leasing office is slightly ajar, beyond it, just a dark mass of nothing. “Sadie.” She starts, turning back to the corpse, before quickly turning away again. “I need you to come look at this.”

“I don’t want to.”

“ _Please_ come look at this.”

Sadie shakes her head, jaw tight, then sighs. She’s sweated through the thin t-shirt she put on that morning. A shirt two sizes too big from the Atlanta Zoo, a sketchily drawn panda on the front. It’s her mom’s. Sadie’s chest hurts, the sun so bright now that it’s higher in the sky that the concrete looks almost painfully scorched. Sadie looks, finally, down at the woman. She’s a grey sort of color, darker splotches at the points where blood has pooled in her body, veins a dark root system just under the skin. But she doesn’t look stiff, doesn’t look locked with rigor mortis, her limbs softly at her sides like she’s just fallen asleep. Sadie crouches down beside Jesse, lifts the collar of her shirt to try and keep some of the smell at bay. “What am I looking at?”

Jesse points to the woman’s chest and Sadie realizes, with a dawning horror, that her skin is pulled nearly clean off her ribs, her lungs swollen like overripe fruit, pressing into the bone. Sadie recoils. “I didn’t do that.” The light refracts around her, brighter now. Her temples pound, mouth so dry it hurts to swallow. “There’s no way I could have done that.” Sadie looks up at the woman’s head. Her skull is nearly shattered but she can still see a sliver of smooth bone where the shot went clean through. She gags, the smell wafting over. “Don’t puke.”

“Fuck off. What the hell did I even need to see this for?”

“I just want you to know I didn’t kill her. I want you to _know_ that, okay?”

Sadie stands. “Fine.”

“Fine?” Jesse stands now too, brushing dirt from his jeans. “I didn’t do that, okay?”

“Okay, I heard you. We’re on the same fucking page.”

“I don’t think we are.” Sadie scoffs. “She ain’t gonna be walking around with a hole like that between her tits. Not like she was.” Sadie swallows hard. She’s starting to feel woozy, unsteady, her heart pounding in her ears. “She was a fucking zombie.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Why not?”

Sadie gapes at him. “Because. Because there’s no evidence for that. There’s nothing in any scientific literature that I’m aware of that would support even the idea of something coming back from the dead.”

“What about like executions?”

She narrows her eyes at him, shaking her head. “What?”

Jesse scuffs the toe of his shoe in the ground, a fine spray of dirt landing on the woman’s torso. Sadie can just make out the torn eyelet lace of her blouse. “Saw something online.” He has his hands stuffed in his pockets, a show of nervous insecurity that seems entirely out of place here, in the sun-scorched lawn of their trailer park, a corpse rotting between them. “Something about how when they used to chop peoples’ heads off, they’d move their mouths and blink and shit. For like whole fucking minutes. Like their brains hadn’t caught up to their bodies.”

Sadie holds herself again, fingers digging into her arms, and even in this heat, she feels goosebumps race up her arms. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.” And then, without even really thinking, Sadie opens her mouth and says, “like viruses, I guess.”

“What?”

“Like viruses. They um…” She shifts from one foot to the other. “most scientists classify them as nonliving but they…” she looks away from the corpse. “They move and they…” She’s only ever taken one molecular biology course in graduate school. A prerequisite before she could head into the greenhouses, her actual bread and butter, but Sadie remembers now, in startling, vivid detail looking through the scope at the twisting, jarking mass of virus under the glass. “It doesn’t matter. This is really all bullshit.” She pulls her shirt again up over her nose and mouth, takes a single step back. “We should,” she takes hold of Jesse’s shoulder, “we should go.” She turns, then pauses. The yard has been empty all day, but now she can see someone walking in the distance, stumbling a little as they round the leasing office. It’s like the woman outside the gas station, a sort of slow shamble, and that heavy feeling returns. An omen, clear as day, and before she even realizes it, Sadie is squeezing Jesse’s shoulder hard. “We have to get inside right fucking now.”

“Got hit real good on the dome looks like,” Jesse says, propped up on the couch, spreading the blinds with his fingers.

Sadie’s beside him, peering out. She feels like a kid again, waiting at the front window for her mom to come home. It makes her shuffle closer to Jesse, close enough that their shoulders touch. Kids again.

Jesse’s assessment holds. The woman’s hair is matted with blood, a deep gash just beside her ear. She jerks like the other woman had, one side slumping as she moves, and even though the afternoon at the gas station feels now an entire lifetime away that sharp pop of premonition flares between her ribs. _Shined,_ her grandmother used to say, _touched. All the women in our family are._ Bullshit, of course. Like ghosts and the afterlife. Like aliens. Like zombies. Sadie runs her fingers along her sternum. The muscle’s jumping, throbbing just parallel to her heart. “Bad enough wound to kill her, you think?”

“Definitely. You ain’t walking away from that.” She hears him shift on the couch. “Oh shit, that’s Denise’s dog.” Sadie’s eyes flit back to the narrow slit in the blinds. A rottweiler’s appeared from behind one of the trailers, its ears pressed back onto its head, teeth bared. The woman seems to notice it in degrees. Pausing, tilting her head up like she’s trying to catch a scent, then, slowly turning. And then, her whole body lurching forward, she descends on it. 

“Oh fuck.” Sadie closes her eyes. The dog makes an awful yelp, starts to whine, whimper. And then a sound so awful she can’t even begin to place it. “Fuck, _fuck_.” She covers her ears like she used to when she was a kid.

“She’s gone,” Jesse says, softly, one hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, she’s gone.” Then the trailer starts to rock.

Sadie knows, cognitively, that she is in shock. That’s why the only reaction she can muster for the sight they find under the trailer is dumb silence. The woman is gone. The corpse of the dog buzzing with flies in the grass. Jesse is gaping at her, mouth just wide open, expectant. And when she gives him nothing, his emotions come roiling to the surface. He can’t stay put. Pacing, raking his fingers through his hair. “God.” His voice cracks. “Fuck!”

Sadie blinks once, twice, takes a half step back, then stops herself, frozen. Their mother moves like a fish, like it’s just the spine that’s working, even the arm that isn’t pinned beneath a cinderblock laying limp and motionless. All Sadie can feel is a steadily rising nausea and then Jesse starts to yell. Cussing and shouting and an almost instinctual horror at the noise pulls her out of her own non-thoughts. She grabs him, pulls him hard to her chest, and wraps her arms tightly around him. He lets her. His chest heaves in her grip and Sadie tries to remember the last time she’d seen her brother cry. Forever ago. And never like this.

“Zombies,” he says, voice a little echo-y. The first thing he’s said in a long time.

It’s evening now. Sadie only knows because she found her phone that afternoon, tucked between the couch cousins. All the windows are boarded up. The door too. Wood they’d filched from the leasing office, pulled off the insides of other trailers. Hammered so long and hard, Sadie’s palms ache. She has two broken nails, one clean to the root. Her heart pounds in her fingertips.

They’re sitting like two matchsticks, both their feet toward the door. Jesse has the gun clutched to his chest. He sniffles and Sadie tries to pretend the sound doesn’t cut her to the quick. She thinks about reaching over, taking his hand, but his fingers are curled so tightly around the barrel of the gun his knuckles are white. And she’s a coward. “Seems like it.”

They spend the first night in silence. In the dark. Sadie dozes on the couch then Jesse does. Then neither of them do. The trailer rocks and sways and outside, even through the boards, she can hear groaning. Like a loud hum. Like there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of people outside their little double-wide. Neither of them say a word about it, sitting facing each other on either side of the couch. Sadie can see the whites of Jesse’s eyes, sometimes, the glint of the gun. “What were grandma’s dreams about?” She asks, pulling her knees up to her chest. “The ones about me?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember.” 

“Do you think they can see us?” Sadie asks as they make their way slowly across the open lawn, crouching in the taller grass, the first rays of morning spilling over the trees. There’s nothing out here, as far as she can tell, but she knows that there is something just beyond the trees. Can feel it like her own heartbeat. “Or do you think they smell us?”

“I wish you wouldn’t say shit like that.” He glances back to make sure she’s still following. “Hurry up.”

“Where are we going?”

“Ex cop. Real son of a bitch. Ain’t much in a fight these days, so he’s probably dead, but at the very least he’ll have some guns.”

He certainly has at least one. Held loosely in his hands, brain like a Rorschach on the back living room wall, recliner wrenched all the way back from the force of the shot. “Gun safe.” Jesse says, mostly to himself, before heading off toward the trailer’s bedroom. Sadie stares at the corpse. Thinks of mulch and rot and her own heart. Pounding now. All the blood rushing away from her head. Woozy, unsteady. She grips the end of the sofa, closes her eyes when the room starts to wobble.

The decision to go back to Atlanta barely seems like a decision at all. They don’t talk about it really. The thought just starts percolating in her mind and apparently in Jesse’s too because when she brings it up, back in their trailer, he just nods, like they’ve already agreed to it.

She didn’t bring much. They don’t have much. Two jars of peanut butter. A steak knife. A flashlight with no batteries. A blanket with a hole on one end from where their mother used to worry it as she watched tv. A few pairs of clean underwear. Bullets. Lots of those. For no reason at all. Sadie drifts back toward the bedroom when Jesse starts sorting them. She moves almost unconsciously to the dresser in the corner. It’s older than she is, been here longer than she ever was. From Goodwill more than likely. A coffee stain on one end, a big chip in the wood on the other. Her mother kept all the important things in the top drawer, right next to her lingerie. Sadie isn’t sure how she knows that, but she does.

She finds an old photograph first. Her mom in the middle, narrow as a reed, hair teased to high heaven. Sadie on one side of her, Jesse on the other, both with gap-toothed smiles. Sadie folds it and slides it into the pocket of her shorts. Beneath that, a necklace. Her grandmother’s. She knows without even looking closer. A delicate lily on a gold chain. A funeral flower. _For luck._ She clasps it around her neck, it feels warm where it lays on her chest. The trailer rocks back and forth. She can hear Jesse cuss from out in the hall.

He’s got the car running, dark exhaust billowing from the tailpipe and Sadie says a little prayer for those bald fucking tires. Praying is not a habit of hers anymore but just that slight tip of her head, those whispered words, they’re a well-worn groove. Heavy with memory. Knelt at the side of Jesse’s bottom bunk with a chorus of crickets coming in through the open window for their nighttime prayers; the smell of sawdust in the pews every Sunday. Her mother bent over, fingers shaking, the cold sweat of withdrawal. Sadie looks back toward the trailer, all the spots underneath couched in shadow, but she can feel her mother there. Feel a tug just at the base of her ribs like a string pulling her toward the woman who she should love but doesn’t. Toward the woman she wants to hate but can’t. “Jesse.” He doesn’t look up from the passenger’s side glovebox. “Jesse.”

“What?”

“Don’t you think we should,” she nods toward the base of the trailer.

“I ain’t a mind reader.”

Sadie swallows. “Don’t you think we should take care of mom?”

He freezes, slowly lifting his head to meet her gaze. “What did you just say.?

She looks over at the rocking trailer and then back at him. “I just wouldn’t…If I were her…” she swallows, “I wouldn’t want to be left here like this. Is all.”

“You wanna be the one to do it?” Sadie doesn’t move. “Didn’t think so.”

The highway’s empty. Even when they merge onto I-285, they’re the only car. Sadie turns her phone on and off. Waits for a message, an email, a phone call. The radio crackles. Parts and pieces of words, songs “Am I dreaming?” She asks, mostly to herself.

Jesse says nothing, just beats his palms on the steering wheel, a nervous rhythm. They pass a car off on the shoulder of the road. All four doors are open. Not a person in sight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3 
> 
> Next chapter we'll even get to see Daryl ;)


	3. Chapter 3

They don’t make it to Atlanta. Get to the interstate turnoff and can’t go any further; a sharp grinding sound from the engine as Jesse slams the brakes. Sadie blinks herself back to herself to see the afternoon sun glinting across a sea of bumpers. Moving nowhere. The silence in the gridlock deafening. Sadie shifts in her seat, straining against the seatbelt. She feels, suddenly, too big for the car. Beside her, Jesse sits stock still, knuckles white around the wheel. “Looks like everybody else had the same idea.” Her voice sounds thin to her own ears, faraway. She swallows hard, throat tighter than it should be. “Where is everyone?”

Jesse says nothing, just kills the engine and ducks out of the car, leaves the door hanging open. Its dings, echoing out across the empty highway. Sadie peers across the dash at the waves of heat rolling off the asphalt, the grass in the median bent over by the force of the sun. She swats at a gnat; hears the squeak of a tire. Sadie unbuckles and leans out her own door, catches sight of Jesse climbing onto the trunk of one of the cars ahead of them. “What are you doing?”

He looks back at her, then over across the highway, hand shielding his face from the sun. “Trying to see what stopped everybody.” He calls back.

Sadie’s eyes dart around the car, the road. She wants to tell him to keep his voice down, a simmer inside her chest that feels like it could boil into panic in no time at all. She’s half in, half out of the car. Feet on the asphalt, one hand clutching the handle, the other tracing the delicate lines of the flower around her neck. The night before seems far away and hazy. Like a long dream. Jesse always would go along with her flights of fancy. She’d pick up ghost stories from the local library when they were young. Memorize them, tell them like they’d come from her own head. He’d sit and listen, enraptured, tell the whole neighborhood the stories. Bloody the noses of anybody that called her a liar. Maybe this is that. Maybe she’s whipped him up and he can’t stop now.

They hadn’t seen anything on the way. Nothing weird. Nothing crazy. Nothing at all in line with what she’s starting to think has been a long, awful dream. Empty roads sure, but they’re from the boonies. It was early in the morning. Sadie slips her phone from the pocket of her shorts. No service, hasn’t had much of it the whole way. She has a sudden urge to call her mother, drops her phone into the center console like it’s hot to the touch, leans out. “Find anything?” He doesn’t answer. She can see him a little further out now, standing on the roof of a car too far for her to see all of. Sadie squirms. The heat’s brutal, air so thick it catches in her throat. She’s covered in a fine, sticky sheen of sweat. A fly buzzes past her, landing on the road. No. Sadie squints. A whole swarm of them, pulsing on the asphalt, a dark stain spreading out from underneath, their wings slick and vibrating. Sadie stands, hands tight on top of the car’s door. “Jesse!” She can’t even see him anymore, her voice echoing over the cars, then vanishing. Her breath is loud, jagged. She holds it, her chest thumping. The dense trees off to one side of the highway are so full of cicadas their leaves seem to undulate with the sound of them, and beyond that, a quiet mechanical hissing. She can see steam rising from one of the cars, its hood wrenched open. Sadie closes her fingers around the charm on her necklace, the metal cool to the touch.

The voice is so faint she almost doesn’t hear it. Until she hears it again and realizes that it isn’t really a voice. It’s a rattle, a groan. All the hair on her neck stands on end. The sound wobbles. Closer, further, winding down the road. Sadie tightens her grip on the car door, raises up to her tiptoes to see if she can catch sight of Jesse. The sound’s coming from one of the cars, she tells herself, the sound’s coming from inside her head.

She catches movement from the corner of her eye, frozen now, glued to the road. Her eyes slide over to the side mirror and then she sees it. Nothing like what she’s seen before. This woman has absolutely, without a doubt, crawled out of the fucking ground. There’s dirt where her skin should be, bone poking through long worn threads of clothes. Like a bad movie. Like a late night special. Creepshow, Coast to Coast. The things they used to fill their nights with, sitting in the twilight darkness of the trailer. Her reaching over to take his hand, hiding her face with the other. She can’t move. Finds herself rooted so in place that even breathing feels hard. 

And then she can smell it. A deep sort of rot. Mulch, vinegar, piss. A strange layer of memories that keeps her drifting until her brain comes back hard to her body. She can _smell_ it. Closer than she thinks, closer than it looks in the mirror. 

There’s a handgun in the center console that she doesn’t know how to use but she grabs it anyway, leveling it at the corpse. Just feet away. Its toes curled painfully under itself as it shambles. She expects it to pause, to slow. Like it’s a person. But it’s not and the noise she makes when she tries to cock the gun only makes it faster, more determined. And so all she does, all she can do, is scream. And maybe that’s what Jesse hears. Or maybe that thread that connects him to her, primordial and eternal, has pulled him back. The shotgun so loud her ears ring. The bullet takes the thing apart, sending it scattering like a fractal core across the road. Bone and blood and gore. And then silence. And then, like the slow strumming of the cicadas, more of them. Coming up from the sides of the overpass, from the shattered windows of cars.

Sadie stands, hands at her sides, panting like a dog, chest pulsing, pulsing, pulsing. “We can’t leave the car.” It’s all she can think to say. Behind her: groaning, the sound like the splitting of bone. It rockets through her, makes her feel _shattered_ inside. “Jesse, we can’t leave the car.”

He doesn’t look at her, just stuffs more into their already straining duffel. “We have to go.” She opens her mouth, a silent plea. For what she has no idea. She’s never seen him like this, every tendon in his neck tight to snap, his eyes on _fire._ “ _Now._ I need you to help me.”

Sadie exhales, shaky, then steps toward the trunk. “Okay. Okay. Tell me what to do.”

Her shoes are soaked, socks drenched and heavy. The packs on their backs have them both bent over. Every muscle in her body aches. And the water smells like stagnation, like rot. Sadie shivers. _Daphnia lumholtzi,_ she assumes. An invasive species of swarming algae common in the American South. So thick and noxious it clogs the gills of fish. She’d watched it once, under the microscope, watched it shiver and twist under her scrutiny. Insect-like. Not alive in a way she can understand, not dead either. She can feel it stick to her ankles as they walk. “What if someone died in the water?”

Jesse grunts. “What?”

“What if someone…” Sadie glances down at her feet. They’ve been wading through sharp reeds, her calves the pale rust of drying blood, fresh blood. The algae’s a burnt, sandy color, bubbling up around the edges; the water shimmers like oil slick. She can’t look at it anymore, looks up at her brother’s back, night falling steadily all around them. No fireflies tonight. Just gnats, mosquitoes so big they’re heavy on their wings.

She doesn’t finish, but he seems to get the picture. She can see him bristle, even in the near darkness. “I wish you wouldn’t say shit like that.”

“Where are we going?” He doesn’t say anything. Just ducks under a low hanging branch, brushing aside Spanish moss. _Tillandsia usneoides._ An epiphytic flowering plant native to, among other places, the American south. Likes to cling to southern live oak and bald Cyprus. Shallow roots in the swamp. Prone to tipping, coming crashing down and then rotting, feeding the soils, the fish. Old in ways that feel cursed. In cycles that feel inescapable. Those soft, clean New England rains, those pristine, uniform pines, have never been further away. 

“People,” she says before she even realizes that she’s said it. But they aren’t people and Jesse seems to already know that, ducking down, pulling her with him, but the splash they make when they sink into the tepid, foul water seems to ripple outward. Until every thing she thought was a person is watching them. Slack jaws and peeling skin, hair matted with gore, hair stiff like straw. And then, like a wave, they’re on them.

“Run!” He says and there’s a look in his eye that takes her to pieces. Older again. A different man than the one she left. “Run!”

“I’m not leaving you!” And the conviction in her voice surprises her.

“I ain’t askin’ ya to. I’m bogged down. Get some of these fuckers off me. Get _out_ of here!”

“Okay.” Sadie scrapes her hair back with her nails. “Okay, okay.”

He cocks the shotgun, the sound so loud she moves instinctually to cover her ears. “Now you listen to me, okay? First light you see, you run for it. It ain’t gonna be whatever this shit is. They’re brainless. I’ll follow you, okay? There ain't shit around for miles, so I’ll find you that way, okay? _Okay?_ ” It doesn’t make sense but Sadie nods, nearly reaches out. To touch him, to tell him something that she can’t quite figure out how to say. But he’s moving and they’re moving and before another thought can even form inside her head, Sadie breaks into a run.

They don’t follow her. None of them. And it’s only when the first pitch of that awful scream comes rolling through the grass toward her that she realizes she’s alone. She stumbles, stops running, and turns toward the sound. The swamp edged up against the field she’s in now. Tall grass swaying in the darkness and in the light of the moon she can see nothing but the distant trees. The scream stops, then starts again, louder, shriller. A scream like she’s never heard in her entire life. Agony, _agony._ She bows at the back, tears streaming down her face. “Jesse!” The grass beside her shivers at the force of his scream, bends to it. She can’t move, she cannot move, and when she finally does, starts to stumble back toward where her brother is, she realizes that the screaming has stopped. That the air around her is thick and quiet, like even the cicadas are holding their breath. And then the sound of them. A groan that rolls into a wave of sound, almost a melody. She can see them, in the distance. Just a shambling line of darkness moving closer and closer. Jesse’s silent. Gone. She can’t move. Coward. _Coward._ Watching through her fingers what Jesse could always face head on. Couldn’t stand quiet, couldn’t stand darkness. Running down the hall to cry to her mother while Jesse slept soundly. Nightmares so big and dark she couldn’t hold them on her own. And he tried to, he always tried to. Sadie turns and runs. A coward, through and through.

The light comes like a prophecy. All the way across the field. Bright in that deep, rural darkness. Like Jesse had foreseen it and Sadie claws up the side of the road toward it. Desperate. All rock and broken glass. It cuts at her fingers, chips her nails and by the time she reaches the road, she almost doesn’t make it over. She’s weary to her marrow.

Fitting really, then, that it shouldn’t be a light at all. But a car consumed in flame. Smoke rising thick and black in the night sky. A plume that blots out the stars. She can feel the heat of the fire on her skin even from far away, raw now from the reeds and the rock. She watches it cast shadows across her body and when one of the car’s doors comes smashing onto the asphalt, the echo loud on the empty road, she feels more alone than she’s ever felt. There’s a hole inside of her in the shape of him. A heartbeat that she didn’t even know was there. Silent now.

Her grief feels endless and then it overtakes her. Sadie drops to her knees and retches. Just bile. No water, no food. She should have called him, should have come home.

Sadie stops moving when the sun starts its slow crawl toward dawn. Finds a clearing in a patch of trees and lets her body drop onto the tall grass. She knows what they’re called. Their species, their genus. Can’t remember now. The world has been wobbling for hours, her head just _pounding_. She tells herself, again, that it’s a dream. And then she closes her eyes like it’ll make it true.

It could be minutes, or it could be hours before she hears the sound. Crunching through the undergrowth, breaking through the quiet of the trees. Every muscle in her body tenses but she can’t make herself stand, can’t make herself move at all, keenly aware now that she is the weakest kind of prey. And so she waits, holding tightly to herself. Bracing. For something awful.

“You ain’t no deer.” Sadie wheezes, opens her eyes. There’s a man standing in the clearing. Tall as a reed, crossbow in his hands, pointing at her. He lowers it, brushing some of his shaggy hair from his face. Sadie rises up to her elbows, tries to blink away the fog in her vision. He watches her do it, head a little cocked like he’s trying to figure her out. Sadie tries back, rises up to her knees so she can get a better look at him. He’s densely muscled made even more obvious from the way he’s torn off the sleeves of his shirt, fabric loose and jagged around the arms. And filthy _._ From his hair to his boots. Caked in dirt and sweat. He crouches down in front of her, bounces just lightly on the balls of his feet to steady himself and she sees he’s got a little scruff on his chin, a little around the thin line of his mouth. “You get bit?”

She blinks at him. “Bit?” Her voice sounds as raw as her throat feels.

He slips his crossbow onto his back. “Guess not. Something you’d probably remember.” He’s got that smooth, broken twang she knows so well, feels deep inside of herself, but when he reaches out, Sadie finds herself flinching away. His fingers retract. “Easy now.” He waits a beat, then presses his palm to her forehead. “Ain’t hot enough to be sick.” Sadie narrows her eyes at him, trying to piece together what he’s just said. The man nods toward her legs. “You walking okay?”

“Yeah.” Sadie shifts her weight to her hands, tries to stand, but a vertigo washes over her so intense her stomach flips. “Oh fuck.”

“Guess not.” The man sniffs, then scoops her up, bouncing her a little to get a better hold. “You got your legs all tore up. Can guess what you were runnin’ from.” Sadie’s head swims, vertigo again, now at the sudden change in altitude. It’s easy to let herself rest against his chest. He smells sharply of sweat, musk, tilled earth. Her eyelids flutter. “Hey.” He jostles her. “Hey, wake the fuck up.” Her fingers find his skin. A layer of sweat, of dirt. Warm like a radiator. Heartbeat strong and solid as it pounds against her fingertips. He shakes her again. “Girl! Hey!” The darkness comes easy. Soft and quiet. His heart thrums. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


End file.
